He continued, however, to go there, but he made his visits more rare,
reflecting, with a shade of surprise at his own considerateness, that it
would be doing her a bad turn to cause gossip in the village. He was,
after all, the overseer, while she was only the wife of a factory-hand
and a factory-hand herself, so that he could not visit the Denes as
another man might, on a footing of equality. The death of Silas’s wife
had given him an excuse at first for frequenting the double cottage, but
that affair was now a month old, and was already beginning to be
forgotten in the rude world of the factory-village, where accidents were
more or less common. Silas himself never alluded to it. He seemed, as
Nan had said, to live in comparative content with Linnet Morgan. Linnet
Morgan was young, educated, and extremely clever; and so merry that
Silas’s dark moods usually ended by being dispelled before his laughter.
Linnet Morgan seemed, in fact, to have taken charge of Silas’s life.
So much, Calthorpe thought, for Linnet Morgan.
But Nan,—ah! Nan was winning and tantalising, demure sometimes and
sometimes impetuous; Nan was shy but confiding; little and sweet and
windblown; and Calthorpe tried to feel large and fatherly towards Nan.
She evidently welcomed him, gave him his chair by the fire; then went
about her occupations, stopping to chatter when she felt inclined,
asking him his opinion with her pretty head held on one side and her
hands on her hips, singing over her work,—adopting him very much, in
fact, as an inmate of her household. This method might put him at his
ease, but it also mortified him. She accepted his visits with a lack of
self-consciousness, he sometimes thought, that would have been
mortifying to any man. He supposed that Gregory was fond of her, but the
difficulty of communicating with Gregory rendered too tedious the effort
of discovering his thoughts. Calthorpe usually nodded pleasantly to
Gregory, and left their acquaintance at that. He thought Gregory a
sneering, sour kind of fellow, jealously wrapped up in his machinery; he
would not let Calthorpe look at his designs, but covered them over with
both hands outspread, when once the overseer bent with a friendly
interest over his shoulder.
But Nan,—no, never had Calthorpe blundered across so delectable a being
as Nan. He cursed himself for having hitherto overlooked the grace and
delicacy which set her so apart from the other working women; he cursed
himself anew each time he watched her as she hung muslin curtains across
her windows, or arranged and re-arranged her wild flowers upon the
dresser. He had to make his observations for himself, for she told him
nothing; she did not tell him how she wilted daily as she passed through
the factory on her way to her own work, which lay among the heaps of
white powder and the myriads of little scent-bottles, and was congenial
to her,—soft powder, coloured boxes, gilt labels, pretty cut-glass, and
a constant rainbow of ribbons. She snipped them with her scissors,
sitting on a high stool before the table, in company with rows of other
girls, all in blue overalls; and the ends of ribbon fell in a scatter of
confetti around her. She noticed everything that the other girls did not
notice. They only lifted their heads to gape at the visitors who were
being taken over the factory, but Nan, gentle, uncommenting, and
inwardly blandished, dwelt with pleasure upon the bright lightness of
the big room, upon the pale sunlight that fell on the bent heads of the
girls,—some of them had fair, sleek hair that looked like spun silk in
the sun,—upon the powdery cleanliness of the floor, and the scrubbed
expanse of the tables between the armies of shining little bottles. She
hated the rest of the factory, that smelt and smoked and clanked; but
this one room approached her secret vision of diaphaneity and
seemliness.